The November Pogroms and the Culture of Remembrance – the “Synagogue Monument” by Margrit Kahl

Source Description

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1938 November pogroms, the
city of
Hamburg on November 9, 1988
dedicated the “synagogue monument” designed as a walk-in space by artist
Margrit Kahl
(1942-2009). Located in
the Grindelviertel in the
Rotherbaum
neighborhood within Eimsbüttel district, the monument commemorates the destroyed
main synagogue of Hamburg’s
German-Israelite congregation. It is based on designs the artist
created in 1983 and 1988 that
were commissioned by the city of Hamburg’scultural office. This
black and white photograph was taken by Margrit Kahl in 1988. The artist documented her work visually at various
stages – during construction, at the dedication, and afterwards – and from
different perspectives. The photo shown here was taken from an upper floor of a
building across the street at Grindelhof. It has been printed in several publications and is
available online in the digital collections of Israel’s Yad Vashem
World Holocaust Remembrance Center’sphoto archive, while prints of it exist in the artist’s estate. It
documents the redesigned square including the “synagogue monument,” which
stretches across an area of 35.5 by 26.4 meters; to the right, the air-raid
shelter is visible; in the background several buildings belonging to the
University of Hamburg
are visible; not pictured here is the Talmud Torah School building
adjoining the square on the left, which in 1988 was
still used by Hamburg’s
Polytechnic School.

Nationwide pogroms

One of the best-known events in the centuries-long experience of anti-Jewish
exclusion and violence is part of the backstory to the National Socialist
genocide: the nationwide pogroms
of November 1938 that became known (and infamous) internationally by
their contemporary name “(Reichs-)Kristallnacht” (Crystal Night, Nuit de
Crystal). These pogroms, which at the time were also referred to as “Reichsscherbenwoche” [Reich Week of Broken Glass]
among other names, marked the most prominent event in the National Socialist
persecution of Jews prior to the Second World War: Justified by its propaganda as retribution for the
assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jew,
the National Socialist regime ordered attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions
all over Germany. In some places the surge of violence already began on
November 7, immediately after the
assassination became public, before escalating nationwide on the night from
November 9 to 10,
1938 and continuing for days in some places. More than 30,000 men
were transported to concentration camps, where they were held for weeks or
months and mistreated. According to recent calculations, well over a thousand
Jews fell victim to this outbreak of violence (this includes several hundred
suicides as well as at least 500 dead and murdered subsequently in the Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen camps). The
perpetrators, who mostly belonged to various party organizations, destroyed a
large share of the sociocultural infrastructure of Jewish life in Germany – especially
synagogues, stores, apartments, retirement homes and orphanages, cemeteries and
schools. Not only due to the retrospective knowledge of Auschwitz must the November pogroms be
considered the most significant turning point for Jewish life in Germany up to this
point.

From “coming to terms with the past” to a “culture of remembrance”

After Germany’s
liberation from National Socialism, the treatment of the November pogroms was
embedded in more general questions of guilt, prosecution, memory, facing the
past, and learning. The initial phase was marked by intense examination of the
far-reaching consequences of the still recent “German catastrophe” (Friedrich Meinecke) – at
least among intellectuals, journalists, and artists. The following years saw the
founding of two German states and the unfolding of the Cold War and were a period
of subdued attention to the recent past that seemed to be neglected politically
and socially and sometimes even to peter out altogether. In the Federal Republic it was
not until the late 1950s that
the critical study of the “Third Reich’s” history and crimes slowly began. While
this departure primarily affected certain sectors of West German society such as
the media, the legal professions, and intellectual and artistic circles, at the
turn to the 1980s a broader
debate on how to deal with the National Socialist period set in, especially in
politics, churches, labor unions, history-minded citizens’ initiatives, and in
academia. Questions of commemoration, memory and the politics of history – be it
in historical places, with regard to commemoration days, monuments, films or
with a view to political conclusions – now increasingly came to overshadow the
earlier question of “coming to terms with the past” (meaning denazification,
legal prosecution, compensation and restitution). Since then the “culture of
remembrance” [Erinnerungskultur] has
progressively established itself as a new key term.

The beginnings of a commemorative tradition – the anniversary of the attack on
the German Jews

After 1945 there were various court cases in which the
perpetrators of the pogroms were tried, but in the end thousands of them were
never held responsible. Throughout the following decades the “Reichskristallnacht,” a still controversial term due
to its seemingly trivializing connotation, was the only event in the history of
anti-Jewish Nazi persecution that became a major, albeit informal, political day
of remembrance in both the Federal Republic and the GDR (although to a
lesser degree). Especially the 50th anniversary of the pogroms in 1988 was commemorated as a special date in thousands of different
events held in both West and East Germany. In the last decades a wide-ranging and
heterogeneous network of initiatives, organizations, government representatives,
locations and traditions has formed, and every year around November 9 / 10 its
members ensure that the memory of the November pogroms is kept
alive. Even after January 27 was institutionalized as the “Day of Remembrance
for the Victims of National Socialism” in Germany in 1996
,
commemoration of the November
pogroms is a permanent, although not formally institutionalized part
of the German culture of remembrance and is upheld by a diverse spectrum of both
civilian and government actors.

The Synagogue Monument – visualizing a gap

The “Synagogue Monument” by Hamburg artist Margrit Kahl belongs among the above-mentioned, wide-ranging
social activities of remembrance held in 1988. It is
also an example of attempts made both within the culture of remembrance and the
arts to approach this history differently than it had been done in the decades
after 1945: critically towards the perpetrators, in
solidarity with the victims, actively interested in gestures of remembrance,
with more visible results, and more strongly focused on the present. The
monument’s dedication was preceded by a slow-moving phase of conceptual
discussions, conflict between different interests as well as procrastination by
the local authorities, which lasted for almost ten years. After it had been
presented to the public by a working group, the Hamburg
senate decided in July 1987 to have
the project realized. The monument was finally dedicated on November 9, 1988 during a commemoration ceremony.
Kahl has described
her work – a combination of conceptual art and sculpture – with these words:
“1:1 projection of the former synagogue’s vaulted ceiling layout – leveled to
the actual ground level.” The artwork, inlaid
into the ground, was carried out – as the black and white photograph shows – in
polished black granite, which traces the vaulted ceiling and the building’s
floor plan in full scale, and in broken dark gray andesite filling the spaces in
between.

The square called Joseph-Carlebach-Platz today, which until 1989 was called Bornplatz and is shown here from the perspective of
Grindelhof, the street
across from the square, was the location of the Jewish congregation’s main
synagogue, it was built between 1904 and 1906 and could seat up to 1,000 people. Contrary to many
reports, the synagogue, which was the largest in northern Germany, was not
destroyed during the surge of anti-Jewish violence in November 1938. In this case the perpetrators defiled the synagogue
on the morning of November 10, broke windows,
damaged the interior and set fire to it the following night (and again two days
later). After the Jewish
congregation had to pay for the 37 meters high building’s
demolition in 1939 / 1940 and
was forced to return the lot to the city, the National Socialist authorities
built a multi-story air-raid shelter right next to the former location of the
synagogue, which still exists today and is used by Hamburg
University. Until 1986 there was an
adjoining parking lot.

Construction of the air-raid shelter (on the far right of the image) had divided
Bornplatz square in two.
Its southwestern section was renamed Allende-Platz by the
Eimsbüttel
district authorities in 1983 on the occasion of the
tenth anniversary of the Chilean president’s death. The
other section, called Bornplatz until then, was renamed Joseph-Carlebach-Platz on
request by the Jewish
congregation in 1989, one year after the
memorial space had been dedicated. It now commemorates Hamburg’s last
chief rabbi, who in 1941 was
deported to the Jungfernhof concentration camp
near Riga, where
he, his wife and three daughters were murdered a year
later.

Layers of remembrance

Margrit Kahl’s memorial
artwork in a public space refers to the three historical layers this place
contains: to the once most significant northern German synagogue, which was an
architectural symbol for the self-confidence and equality of Hamburg’s Jews – and
thus to a special chapter in Jewish and German-Jewish history; to the violence
carried out and legitimized by the state which led to destruction, murder and
expulsion in this as in many other places; and finally, to the city of
Hamburg’s
late efforts at remembrance as well as those of its committed citizens to create
a democratic place of remembrance as a symbol of permanent visualization in this
historic place that was changed from a scene of life to a crime scene.

As an expression of new aesthetic-artistic conceptions of remembering the
National Socialist persecution of Jews, the synagogue monument belongs among the
second phase of such conceptions in the Federal Republic. While
memorial stones and plaques were the rule up and down the country during the
first phase that still employed almost exclusively traditional forms, Kahl’s monument illustrates
a tendency emerging since the 1980s which goes beyond traditional forms and virtually
intervenes socially and spatially. As is usual for such retrospective
distinctions of phases, developments overlap: on the one hand, there was and
continues to be a continuity of traditional forms – Hamburg, for example,
has realized an extensive program of memorial plaques since the 1980s; on the other hand, the
new formal language was especially informed by an increased awareness, grown out
of the generational change and public controversies such as the “Historikerstreit” [historians’ dispute] of 1986 / 87, of the radical nature
as well as the singularity of violent Nazi crimes, which therefore had to be
expressed by other forms appropriate to the new perspective on the period of
National Socialism. “The monument to the former synagogue renders the building
it commemorates experienceable once again to a degree; it is present and absent
at the same time.”

The dedication of the synagogue monument represented an important step in the
process of reclaiming and reviving this once important center of Jewish life in
Hamburg’s
Grindel quarter. With the reopening of the directly adjacent Joseph-Carlebach-School,
which had been closed in 1942, including the
accommodation of the Jewish
congregation’s administrative office in the school building in
2002 as well as the opening of Jewish cafés and
businesses, Jewish life returned to the Grindel. Margrit Kahl’s “Synagogue
Monument” provides a kind of historic reading aid by visualizing the location
and history of the congregation’s former center and thus the sad backstory to
this most recent revitalization in a particularly concrete way.

A central place of remembrance

“It will depend on the viewer whether they experience and perceive this place as
a horror vacui or a genius loci” – thus Margrit Kahl’s response to
the question how her monument might be interpreted and received. The unobtrusive pavement mosaic,
sometimes called “Hamburg’s most inconspicuous monument,” is an “almost
monochrome, subtle and abstracting work which entirely avoids pathos.”

The multiple meanings of this place including the history of its reception have
led to its becoming the central location in the city of Hamburg where the
National Socialist policy of persecution and extermination is remembered. The
work of remembering is upheld annually by various organizations in vigils and
other events. The pavement mosaic, which is
two-dimensional only on its surface, vividly symbolizes key aspects of Jewish,
German, and Hamburg history: the groundswell of National Socialist
violence, the crimes and the losses, and finally the difficult and slow
reclaiming of this epoch by a critical culture of remembrance.

What had been destroyed, had perished and was lost because of the National
Socialist tyranny is shown to later generations through the means of a modern,
commissioned piece of conceptual art that impressively reflects this historic
watershed moment. The historic gap (in more than one sense) remains visible and
in fact can be walked in; it was not made to disappear by a reconstruction or a
new building (a new synagogue for Hamburg’sJewish congregation was
built at Hohe
Weide between 1958 and 1960), thus allowing multiple ways of experiencing and
interpreting it. Meanwhile the fact that the Joseph Carlebach School
adjoining the monument and the area of Joseph-Carlebach Platz
where the monument is located have to be guarded by the police force around the
clock is part of a complex historical-political situation that is by no means
self-explanatory.

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About the Author

Harald Schmid, Dr. phil., born 1964, political scientist and historian, is research assistant for the Bürgerstiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Gedenkstätten and editor of the Jahrbuch für Politik und Geschichte. His research interests include: regional contemporary history, commemorative culture and history of politics (especially the reception of Nationalsocialism), memorial sites and political extremism.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 International License. As long as the work is unedited and you give appropriate credit according to the Recommended Citation, you may reuse and redistribute the material in any medium or format for non-commercial purposes.